Municipalities seek disclosure on what trains are carrying

Train tracks near St-Ambroise and St-Augustine Sts. run close to homes in Montreal’s St-Henri neighbourhood.

Photograph by: Dario Ayala
, The Gazette

MONTREAL — Since a derailment destroyed the heart of Lac-Mégantic on July 6, citizens’ groups, municipal governments and national bodies have been mobilizing to obtain more disclosure and increase government regulations about the types of materials that travel by rail — especially on lines that run through populated neighbourhoods.

On Monday, elected officials from Montreal’s Sud-Ouest borough joined Vision Montreal Leader Louise Harel near the railroad tracks on de Courcelle and St-Jacques Sts. to add their voices to the movement.

Along with the citizens’ group Nous et les Trains, they announced that a motion will be put forward at city hall next Monday to apply a civil security law, passed in 2001, that they hope will force private rail companies to reveal the contents and frequency of travel with hazardous materials — or at least push the provincial and federal governments to force the rail companies.

“Right now, there is no obligation to give the information, even if the municipality is expected to be the first responders to an accident,” borough Coun. Véronique Fournier said. “We had a derailment and, still, communication with CN (Railway) has been very hard.”

On Sept. 24, 2011, a Canadian National train with 91 cars was travelling east when six cars derailed near Point-St-Charles, damaging about 200 metres of track. According to a Transportation Safety Board of Canada investigation, no one was injured in the incident and there were no spills of hazardous material.

But the TSB noted that the allowable speed of the area was 24 km/h. According to the train’s black box, which records data, it was moving at 43 km/h at the time of the accident.

The response from CN was unacceptable, Sud-Ouest borough Mayor Benoit Dorias said. “They said: ‘Everything is fine,’ and that a memo had been sent to CN engineers, reminding them not to speed … but we want something a bit more concrete.”

The borough plans to use Article 8 in provincial civil security law to glean more information. The article states that “any person whose activities or property may generate major disaster is required to declare the risk to the municipality (or Minister of Public Security) where the source of the risk lies.”

At the news conference, Harel argued municipalities are unable to take “appropriate preventive measures” without such pertinent information from rail companies that travel through them. She added that the provincial and federal governments also have a part to play to ensure the civil security law is followed.

CN says there are already procedures in place where the railroad company will give a list of dangerous goods to emergency responders upon request, spokesman Louis-Antoine Paquin explained.

“The reason we give a general list and not a precise one is that it would be an administrative hassle for us and for them, since our client requests can change very often,” Paquin said. “We would constantly be calling and going through the changes in schedule.”

CN does offer training and simulation exercises to emergency services if their municipal responders haven’t been exposed to certain goods, he said.

“It’s important for emergency responders to have the right information at the right time, certainly, but these kinds of accidents don’t happen that often,” Paquin said.

Requests for additional information from rail companies has jumped following the Lac-Mégantic tragedy. Since January, CN has reported 38 requests for the dangerous goods list — 30 of them since the July 6 accident.

Shortly after the derailment in Lac-Mégantic, Eastern Township mayors held meetings with federal Transport Minister Lisa Raitt, beginning what she said would become “an ongoing dialogue.”

The Federation of Canadian Municipalities, representing 2,000 communities across the country, also recently created a national rail safety working group that held its first meeting July 29, and will meet again in Montreal on Friday.

The Union des municipalités du Québec, a provincial group, is also planning to make a resolution on the matter after a working group meets Aug. 23. And officials from Hampstead and Côte-St-Luc have begun setting up meetings with Canadian Pacific, the company working on their territory, slated for September.

Bill Steinberg, the mayor of Hampstead, said he even started a petition about the issue and his town council adopted a resolution on Aug. 5 on the transportation of hazardous materials by rail.

For Peter King of Nous et les Trains who lives in Point-St-Charles, dialogue is key.

“We should be able to have a reasonable discussion, which recognizes the need for trains to move, but also recognizes and respects the people who live next to the tracks,” he said. “Because we are here.”

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